BPN722: Pulse-Echo Ultrasonic Fingerprint Sensor on a Chip

Project ID

BPN722

Website

Start Date

Wed 2013-Aug-14 21:51:30

Last Updated

Mon 2015-Feb-02 17:44:18

Abstract

The proliferation of electronic devices such as smartphones creates a pressing need for reliable biometric authentication.
Present solutions such as capacitive fingerprint sensors have failed to gain wide acceptance due to their susceptibility to
contamination from oils, perspiration, and dirt. Ultrasonic fingerprint sensors solve these problems but currently available devices
are too large and costly for deployment in consumer devices. This motivates us to design a small-volume and fully-integrated
ultrasonic fingerprint sensor using a monolithic CMOS-MEMS process to overcome the disadvantage of current commercial ultrasonic
fingerprint sensors. The prototype consist of a 24x8 array within 2mm x 0.8mm area is able to image real fingerprint, and a 5mm x
4mm second version is under fabrication.